The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.
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Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
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Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
Jump in the discussion.
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What would you add to your emotional-motivational memory palace?
A memory palace is an imaginative, spatial arrangement of visual objects, usually taking the form of a predetermined walking route or the memorized layout of a building. It is a 2000+ year-old memory technique used throughout antiquity and the Middle Ages. With practice you can memorize thousands of “items” placed within a spatial arrangement, and keep them stored for longterm use.
I’ve been thinking about how this technique can be used for an emotional benefit. Let’s say you wanted to craft the perfect space for understanding your own life goals. You want to enter this space in order to remember all of the important whys and what fors of your life. You might also want a space where you can remember all of the why I must nots. What would you place within your space? You can put anything in there: a person, a book, an album cover or image which reminds you of a song, objects which remind you of experiences and scents, anything.
As an example, if your raison d’etre were running, the palace might include:
Signs and symbols of your favorite past running experiences and paths.
Some people who remind you of the joys of running, or people who are fit from frequent running.
Salient images of the glory of continued running. Maybe you imagine a collection of gold objects which signal your progress, and empty spots in a trophy room which signal your future accomplishments.
Symbols of your favorite fantasies to use while you run (fleeing from zombies, racing against the clock to deliver an important message, chasing a wild animal or an attractive woman).
Some metaphorical reminder that pain is fleeting and laziness is never worth it.
I was thinking about learning this technique, but I cannot find uses for it. So as I understand, it's great for learning ordered lists, and typically the technique is illustrated by memorizing a list of some random words: "sausage", "typewriter", "ball" — a shopping list, essentially. But other than that...
You cannot use it for language learning — other mnemonic techniques are far more useful. Not for memorizing syntax of programming languages. Or mathematical formulas. Or scientific concepts. I guess you can memorize trivia like the list of British monarchs with it? "William II had red hair, so we place a red wig before the TV set, Henry I was titled 'Beauclerc' because he had good education, so we put an academic cap on the toilet seat..."
I understand that you said "emotional-motivational", but I am more interested in scholastic uses for it.
You can use it for these things. Whether it is most optimal for school is another matter.
For formulas, you can “signify” various applications of a formula and edge cases in a spatial representation, and then mentally walk through them when confronted with a problem. You can also visually signify things you usually forget regarding the formula. Memorizing a formula is actually an extremely simple application of the art of memory. Numbers are easily converted into images, as are math symbols. You would just need to know a number system, which is what most beginners focus on. The people who can memorize a deck of cards in 30 seconds are just converting the numbers into visuals through an encoding system.
It is ordered, yes, but you don’t need to traverse front to back. You can traverse it just like you’d traverse walking through your house.
As for languages, I think you can find some use by memorizing groups of nouns according to their phonetic similarity.
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